Heroes All - John Akii-Bua and Renaldo Nehemiah
All sorts of sportsman have to overcome obstacles. But few do it with the same regularity as the world's hurdlers.
Ed Moses, Colin Jackson, Yordanka Donkova, Roger Kingdom, Debbie Flintoff-King, Sally Gunnell, David Hemery - whether over 100, 110 or 400 metres, the hurdles events have produced any number of special athletes. Singling people out is far from easy. However, John Akii-Bua and Renaldo 'Skeets' Nehemiah are men with extraordinary stories to tell.
John Akii-Bua was born on December 3rd 1949 in Uganda. One of 43 children, John stood out from his siblings thanks to his astonishing athleticism. Unfortunately, such talents offered little hope of social or economic advancement in a country such as Uganda. Indeed, even when Akii-Bua was at the peak of his career, circumstances at home made life impossibly hard for the man who had single-handedly reinvented the 400m Hurdles.
Akii-Bua's rise to the top of the hurdling world stemmed from two things - i) astonishing physical fitness which he attained by training for hours on end with weights strapped to his body, and ii) the coaching techniques of an Englishman by the name of Malcolm Arnold. The chap who'd mastermind the careers of Colin Jackson, Mark McCoy, Nigel Walker and Dai Greene, Arnold was all of 30 when he decided to pack up his family and move to Africa. The reward for such a brave decision was a journey with Akii-Bua that took them all the way to the 1972 Olympic final.
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